Ban the bottom-of-the-TV-screen sports ticker. Everyone has a smartphone, they can get scores anytime they want, they get alerts every minute about the teams and players they care about, so enough already with the endless scroll that clutters up every freakin’ sports broadcast. ESPN used to only show scores of other games twice an hour and that was okay but now it’s a non-stop distraction that simply disrupts the game for people with razor-thin attention spans like me. I also believe that the non-stop score/news ticker is an insidious communist mind game that can hypnotize some and convince others that world-altering news is going to scroll by at any second. The sports ticker is causing mental instability and the general breakdown of society.

Eliminate all instant replay. No one can keep track of what is and is not reviewable anymore and the replay rules are random and different for every sport. Truly, the referees are right almost all the time … close enough! Blown calls equal out. Personally, I want all football games to last seven hours, but the flow and beauty of the game get absolutely killed by ten-minute stoppages after every play. And most importantly, the use of instant replay eliminates almost all of the really heated arguments between players, coaches and officials. In baseball instead of a good old-fashioned, nose-to-nose argument the manager just holds up his hand and signals for a replay, like a fuckin’ diner signaling a waiter for more bread & butter. Fuck that! We need less replay and more scenes of baseball managers sprinting out of the dugout to cover the umpire’s face with angry saliva and his shoes with infield dirt.

Stop making football safer. Everyone knows banging your head into a wall gives you a concussion. All these players have free will. They want to be rich and popular and wear layers of gold jewelry and have sex on the road with NFL groupies. They know what’s up and they want to risk life and limb, so let ’em. Hell, almost all NFL injuries happen because of fluke geometry that causes limbs to be bent at unnatural angles. There’s nothing you can do to stop it or prepare for it or predict it. Changing the natural elements of football and trying to dictate how players run and move and block and tackle – trying to change the instinctive way football players play football – will just lead to more injuries. If players are forced to think and do complicated mental calculations instead of just reacting – players will get hurt. Stop the handwringing and let the kids play.

Make the NFL more like the Canadian Football League. Start the season in June. Make the field bigger and wider and let the offensive players all move at the same time and get a running start toward the line of scrimmage. Penalize a team for kicking the ball out-of-bounds and make it a rule that any ball kicked anywhere has to be returned. Mandate that the entire defense has to line up at least one yard off the ball so that there will be more running collisions and maybe running the football can actually become a thing again. Award teams a single point for random things that only the officials truly understand. Name teams after Eskimos and polar bears and sheets of ice and Canadian bacon.

For every baseball game, the teams only get ONE ball. The MLB has become cavalier about its use of baseballs during the game. Hundreds and hundreds of perfectly good baseballs are wasted every game. Shit, if the ball hits the dirt they throw it out. If the pitcher doesn’t like the way it feels, he gets a new ball. Well, no more! Just one ball per game. With the money saved on the cost of baseballs alone, every stadium in the MLB can sell beer for $1! We want to see the ball good and dirty by the seventh inning. The way it goes now, batters are encouraged to hit foul balls because there’s an endless supply of extra balls. After six or seven trips into the stands to retrieve the ball in the first inning, these fuckin’ hitters will learn to keep the ball in the field of play. If a guy hits a home run, whoever ends up with the ball has to give it back. If he won’t give it back, then it will be taken by force by retired mobsters employed at stadiums for this purpose. Baseball has set a bad precedent by encouraging fans to keep something that doesn’t belong to them. If the game ball somehow gets lost for real, then the game’s over … baseball would be better if it was more like the game played on the sandlot anyway.

Photo credit: The Library of Congress on Visualhunt / No known copyright restrictions